They looked at me like I was sick.

These are essays with a roving gaze whose authors travel through geographic and intellectual spaces with the same ease with which we used to walk around in New York.

Özdamar knew that arriving in a country with no return ticket meant voluntarily surrendering to an indeterminate foreignness.

There is a surer way for international literature to make us better tourists.

With much of our world deeply divided, stories such as these become more essential than ever to ease our collective pessimism.

We were both quite fat, but Ali’s body carried more promise than mine.

Every night before they went to sleep, the people of the village imagined their own deaths.

“From here on out it’s rooftop to rooftop, hocam.”

I’m twelve years old, I won’t have to do a lot of time, I’ll be out before you know it.

“Erzurum is a wound I carry inside me.”

Did she or her housemates know about the secret of the bathroom?

In the current environment of relentless political strife . . . debate deteriorates into name-calling; partisans morph into zealots, complex issues are reduced to binary terms, and hostility seethes just beneath the surface.

I was bound. I was a registered piece of inventory. I was a liability. I wasn’t going anywhere.

In this troubling context, the need for portrayals of queer lives around the world becomes even more urgent.

© 2017 Beldan Sezen. Translation of the text © 2017 Charlotte Collins. Translation of the signs and newspaper headlines © 2017 Canan Marasligil. All rights reserved.

What do you want us to do, sit on their heads?

Every town had two soccer teams. A right-wing one and a left-wing one.

Comics themselves have a role to play in the construction of a more globally aware social consciousness.

''The clock inside has no numbers, it has only memories.''

Aram's mutilated body on that tree had grown larger and larger in my mind.

You had no name when we met / we did not notice it wasn’t there

We were forced by the state itself to take sides.

If you look in the mirror too long it hits you.

I was more or less enjoying the daytime / I was watching grass sprout from cracks in the asphalt

Rosa would no longer be falling off of horses. Instead, she would bag the manure of the circus animals and sell it to villagers.

Some weekends my parents and I went from Mardin to Syria and stayed in Kamışlı, the town nearest to the Turkish border. Although it was a town, I compared Kamışlı, with its wide, well-kept roads, its…

I and my trusty umbrella / he's always at hand